by Sean Platt
At the surface were trends of rebuilding societies. Minds that Mara seemed to be saving for history’s sake: an archivist, a storyteller, a chess master, a scholar in the study of memory. And below it all a single trend: reproduction.
Go forth and multiply.
Mara’s logic said: Diversity prevents the chance of quasi-inbreeding — of unfavorable recessive genes finding their matches. We can’t have heart defects. We can’t have cancer markers. We can’t have high cholesterol. We can’t have diabetes. And within Jabari’s radiating mindscape, Clara saw a cloud of internal strife. She saw the viceroy’s guilt. Her hatred of eugenics. Her recognition that what she was doing wasn’t different from when the Nazis tried to “purify” the world, alongside the acknowledgement that she had to do it anyway.
The only difference between me and Hitler, Clara heard on the wind, is that the Astrals are doing the killing for me.
Fahim Khoury, mother.
Jacki Sarkis, mother.
Raakel Naser, mother.
Paavo Bitar, nurse and mother.
Clara felt Jabari’s pain in her chest like a knife. A knife that Clara, even from where she stood, knew Jabari would prefer to use on herself.
And children were called. Many children. Women and kids came first, this time out of necessity. If there was an extinction coming, survivors needed two things most: healthy children and the potential to multiply.
Then it hit Clara.
Why they were here.
Why she’d felt so compelled to come.
“We need to get on that boat.”
Logan turned to Clara. “What?”
She didn’t bother to repeat herself. Of course he’d heard her.
“Listen to who she’s picking! It’s all about the future of the species.” Clara sent the collective all the mercenary, triage images her mind could find: hard decisions made by leaders to preserve the greater good.
“And?”
“We’re the future. That’s what the man in boots has been trying to tell us.”
“They’re calling lots of kids, Clara.”
“Not kids! Us!” Again she flooded the collective with images, suddenly sure that time was shrinking. The collective’s awareness of the world’s other Lightborn seemed to have faded into the background, but in Clara’s mind they were still fresh and bright. Still present. She could hear them in Bristol, in Nice, in Petrograd, in Montreal and Tokyo and Krakow and Stockholm. And the waves were coming. The waves had already come.
She showed them their own group mind, like looking in the mirror. She showed them the way they processed thoughts in parallel and the way most minds processed them linearly. She showed them other Hideouts like theirs. And she showed them the Astral eye, blinking away but unable to see.
“Don’t you understand? We can teach them, Logan! We can teach the other kids how to be like us!”
“We … What?” He shook his head, genuinely not understanding. Clara felt frustration rise and bubble. She wanted to shake him. Wasn’t he supposed to be the leader? Weren’t they all supposed to share a consciousness? How could they not see the puzzle fitting together?
Water surged. More people screamed. Clara found it at her waist, now wearing the waterline like a belt.
“Come on,” Clara said, not waiting for the others before pushing forward, past a line of Titans who paid them no mind. “I have an idea.”
CHAPTER 35
In the Etemenanki Sprawl, terrified locals stared as the sea to the north rose in a wall of water with no ceiling. It towered above them, seemingly as tall as many of their tallest buildings stacked atop one another like building blocks. Their minds told them to run and hide. But a more practical and primal part admitted that there was nowhere to go. The entire island was either lowlands or a risen middle. The wall looked taller than all but the highest mountains, and there was no time left.
Waves swallowed the shoreline. There was little gap between the first surges driven by the waves and the waves themselves. For a brief time waterlines on the beaches and cliffs rose, sometimes kissing the foundations of far-back houses, sometimes leaking down streets and overflowing storm sewers. Then for a briefer time, water receded, and those unable to flee and only seeing the approaching wall in the silhouette of the north’s short days allowed themselves to believe it might not happen, though every one of them knew it was a lie. Water moved back on the undertow preceding the assault. Beaches became long and dry, cliff basins seeing more of their bottoms. Then the entire island seemed to inhale and hold it, knowing what the broadcasts had made sure they saw. The glaciers were gone, along with the ice shelves. The north pole was nothing but ocean.
Water came in its first wave, still rising, rolling forward with a continent’s force. Lowlands were leveled first, washed clean second. On the new ocean’s floor, once the people had either died immediately or floated up to perish later, humanity’s artifacts lifted away from the old surface and stirred in the currents like sugar dissolving in water. Today’s buildings now tomorrow’s relics.
Atop the Old Goat crater, Viceroy Maj Anders stood and watched it come. The distant ocean became the sea at her feet. Old Goat was tall, but the water would soon grow taller. It wasn’t yet over, and the seas were still rising.
The foolhardy had tried to reach the Astrals’ vessel since its location had been reported. The aliens had shot anything with wings or propellers or that glided or floated out of the sky. Lava had handled all the rest who’d attempted bravery and failed.
There was a tall mountain beside the Old Goat crater, and as Maj looked up she saw the heartiest of her capital’s people at its top. They’d known the water would rise, and they’d tried to rise above it. Maybe they’d survive. Maybe, on those few square miles of barren rock without food, fresh water, or shelter, they’d manage to survive what was coming until they finally couldn’t anymore, and expired in the last of humanity’s unprotected remnants.
But lower down, near Old Goat’s rim with Maj and the others, hundreds of people wore grim expressions. She’d heard not a word whispered between them, but they all seemed to have reached the same conclusion as the Astrals had given her — as they’d commanded Maj to follow and obey, as viceroy of her people.
The water rose and seeped into the crater, quenching the lava in a deafening dragon’s hiss. The people backed away as the scalding steam rose skyward.
Water rose. Waves came. And when the ocean was too high to stand, those who’d come to the lip of Old Goat swam away until the vessel broke free and the water cooled to merely tepid.
Then they swam back to the great boat and climbed aboard, the lava’s challenge irrelevant.
In Hanging Pillars, the archipelago trailing from Old Greece went first, those who’d made outland homes climbing into both small and large boats that, in the teeth of the surge, all became tiny. Water towered dozens of feet, to hundreds of feet, and then kept coming. Inland surge on the mainland, away from Hanging Pillars proper, increased its volume and fury as citizens stormed for higher ground. It hadn’t been raining in Hanging Pillars just as it hadn’t rained much at Etemenanki, but once waves swallowed the beaches, humidity rose in the Mediterranean sun, and a low fog boiled from nowhere.
The rise came more slowly to Hanging Pillars than it had to the northern countries, who’d been first in line for the melted water’s assault. Boaters felt confident at first, many men and women in swimsuits with bronzed skin, daring the apocalypse to take them. They’d live it out in style, they boasted. They’d prepped. They knew how to survive. And in Greece, the sun — once the fog dispersed — would still be warm.
But as the water rose, currents formed as the ocean found its new level, as water wicked into the land’s hidden spots and dragged eddies with it, as fresh water from the north made its slow way down to the middle latitudes, as fresh water from the south percolated upward when the south was melted. And as the salinity changed along with the water’s temperature — as the fog rolled in and out, as the jet
stream shifted in response, moving from high pressure to low — invisible rivers within the water made it turbulent. Boats moved independent of their motors, and whirlpools beckoned. New waves formed as the water tried to equilibrate and find its balance.
One large boat — a cruise ship commandeered by its former captain and staffed by a willing crew — swayed as a cross-current struck its underside, then listed in earnest as its hull dragged along what had previously been a summit of one of Hanging Pillars’s highest hills. The hull punctured like a modern-day Titanic then was driven toward a large swirling vortex caused by water filling the city’s sewers, tunnels, and subways. The ship sank slowly, its survivors swimming on borrowed time.
Cool, fresh water coming from the north drove the tropical fish toward the warm mass of what had recently been hot, urban rock, and as the fish came predators followed. A man named Spiros, who had prepared his fishing boat with a cooler and hoped for the best after realizing he was nowhere near brave enough to reach the Astral vessel, found himself temporarily superior to many braver men who hadn’t been quite so courageous (or at least fast) enough to reach the vessel in time. He watched as his friends and neighbors swam above what had recently been his neighborhood, then turned away in horror when sharks came in the hundreds.
In Canaan Plains, Viceroy Jayesh Sai stood hand in hand with his granddaughter, Nitya, aboard the vessel as it broke its own Astral-fabricated moorings and rose with the ocean, simultaneously guilty and glad for the white stranger’s intervention. The stranger had told Jayesh where the ark was located — a good thing because although Jayesh might have made it on his own, Nitya and her mother never would have. The way was too rough, the terrain too rocky. The Astrals’ challenge, the man had told him, was supposed to test human persistence. Then he’d waved his hand dismissively and said that even pre-Astral video games had offered cheat codes and shortcuts. It wasn’t unfair to exploit them. It took as much persistence to find those shortcuts, and much more courage — for the unknown — to use them.
A very long tunnel, traversable on Jayesh’s electric golf cart. A short climb up a ladder. Then the inaccessible ship had become instantly accessible for anyone to whom Jayesh revealed the stranger’s secret.
If all board the ship, there will not be room for those who must board. It is not right that I should survive while they do not.
But you already survived, the man had told him. This is what the Astrals intended. You have the code, and only you can deactivate the shield around their vessel.
But I was meant to take the hard way, Jayesh had said. I was meant to take the same test and prove myself worthy same as anyone not blessed to be the viceroy.
But what of Nitya?
What of her?
You would not have gone without her. Not without Nitya, not without Suri, not without your friends Eshan and Keya. Don’t you see, Jayesh? I haven’t shown you a cheat. You would not have gone without my intervention. And because you are the one with the code, nobody would have reached it and all would have died.
Jayesh had looked at the strange man in his Western garb — blue jeans, scuffed and dirty boots, hands that were large and worn like leather. And he’d said, You are telling me only what I wish to hear, not what is true or fair.
Balls had reappeared from the man’s pocket. He’d rolled them around for a few seconds then made them disappear. One remained, and he’d handed it to Jayesh.
Just because it’s what you want to hear doesn’t mean it’s not fair or true.
It’s not as the Astrals wanted this to happen, Jayesh had protested.
At this, the man smiled. That’s why it’s fair and true.
Now, with the ocean rising and the land almost gone, Jayesh looked across his former kingdom. He’d told no one how he’d reached the ark. Only those he’d taken knew. They were all as reticent to give themselves away.
He reached into his pocket, removed the stranger’s silver sphere, and tried to roll it across the back of his palm. It seemed to fall away, and because he was at the vessel’s railing, Jayesh was sure that the ball would drop to endless ocean’s floor. But then the thing seemed to pause its fall long enough for Jayesh to snag it. He slipped it back into his pocket, wondering what it was. He had a strange impulse to get rid of it but kept changing his mind. He was curious, now, why it hadn’t dropped away. Maybe it wanted to be held, and staying in the possession of Jayesh Sai had become its purpose.
There was a storm in the distance.
This was far from over.
In Loulan Mu, Lee Sūn stood by the gangplank of the vessel nestled high in the mountains. All was quiet. Plenty of people had already boarded, but only a slow stream of newcomers had shown themselves.
She stood, touching her pocket, feeling the silver sphere in its hiding place as she considered, yet again, going for her tablet. The pull was strong but compulsive; she definitely didn’t need to know more than she already did. She’d heard reports that the water was rising fast, closer to the ocean. But despite all the fear in those reports, it was getting hard, now that she’d met the man who called himself Stranger, to separate Astral fact from propaganda. The blood? That had been designed for reaction. The melting ice caps? That, judging by the reports of rising oceans, was fact. But was it really? Stranger made her wonder.
Do you really think the Astrals didn’t know about your plan to rendezvous with the other viceroys? Do you really think they haven’t known all along that you’re all rogue? Do you truly believe that you and the others were chosen as humanity’s best representatives … rather than because you were the most unwilling to do as others said?
Do you really believe that all of this isn’t propaganda — done specifically to provoke a reaction, same as Heaven’s Veil’s destruction?
Sūn didn’t buy the insinuation. She didn’t want to. It was too bleak. She could stomach anything as long as there was hope, but Stranger’s implanted idea left little room for faith. If any humans were alive now, it was only because the Astrals meant to keep toying with them, and any plans Sūn made to extricate humanity, the Astrals were already well aware of, giving them the green light to see what might happen. Forget about any genuine odds of survival.
She pulled the ball from her pocket and looked at her reflection in its shiny surface.
Don’t worry, Stranger had told her. They might know about your intention to meet with the other viceroys, but not what you would say. Just like they know I’m here, but not what I mean to do. Not the ways I’ve made some changes of my own.
But the words seemed hollow to Sūn now that she watched her vessel fill. The flow was smooth and orderly because only people who stumbled across the thing could board it. Stranger had told her that in other cities, vessel occupants had been decided in other ways — and yes, there had been rioting and bloodshed as citizens jockeyed for their places. The same wasn’t true of Loulan Mu. In Sūn’s city, the vessel’s existence hadn’t been announced. No one was looking, so it was only discovered by the lucky few who wandered far. A crew of hearty, healthy loners. People who hiked enough to discover something so hidden by chance.
The ball dropped from Sūn’s hand, striking the rocks underfoot and rolling away, before stopping quite suddenly at the feet of a man in worn sandals, surrounded by his family, holding several fishing rods and a box of lures and hooks.
He retrieved the ball at his feet.
Then he limped forward.
He handed the ball to Sūn and made a small, polite bow before limping up the gangway with his wife and children behind him.
Sūn watched the man. He didn’t fit the profile. A fisherman who’d come as if prepared, with rods and tackle and packs on his family’s backs — a fisherman with a pronounced limp who’d have trouble hiking for a few hours at most?
She gripped the small silver sphere. And as she did, Sūn heard Stranger’s voice as clearly as if he were whispering in her ear.
They know more than humanity realizes, but they don’t know everythin
g.
CHAPTER 36
“Liza?”
“I know.”
“Liza!”
“I know, Mick! I know, okay!”
Mick held up the tablet. “No, this is from our man Tad. You know, the oceanographer? He says — ”
Mick’s voice was rushed, urgent, jamming in words before Liza could cut him off. But she was just as rushed, equally urgent, feeling like she barely had the seconds required to rebuke her right-hand man. He was supposed to be helping her finish what needed finishing. The world had enough alarmist assholes, and had since well before Astral Day.
“That there’s a huge wave coming at us from Antarctica? Because their big ship just melted the goddamned ice cap? Yes, Mick, I know! Okay? Now get the fuck over here, and help me with this!”
Mick walked obediently toward the desk in their makeshift operations center. The place had the feel of a construction office: a converted trailer floored with cheap carpeting, possibly with company calendars on the walls showing heavy machinery moving dirt, cranes lifting girders. This command center was a bit simpler and starker, but that was mainly because Liza and her staff didn’t need much. Charlize was out front calling cutthroat pairs into a microphone. Jason and Lucy were entering results into the vessel’s passenger manifest just because it seemed right to have one. But really, Liza could have handled this by tossing weapons into a pile and announcing a battle royale. And really, now that the clock was ticking, that’s exactly what she wanted to do.
“How long, Mick?” Liza asked. “How long did Tad say we have before the waves hit?”
“Depending on the melt rate and — ”
“Just give me a number. Make a guess.”
“Hell. Thirty minutes?”
“Thirty minutes?”
“We’re at the cape of Africa. It’s right there. He says it’ll hit us before the water from the north cap makes its way down here.”